Names for pleasures (I)
At the limits of being (intoxication and criticism; mission outline)
Directory
Chapters in italics are unpublished; unpublished chapters are tentative in title and content. Edited and updated as of Feb. 10, 2023.
At the limits of being
(intoxication and criticism; mission outline)Periodization and overview
(an addendum and redraft of the initial post; description of present method, thoughts, and intentions; overview of events, transformations, and thesis)
Poison
(the development of the notion of intoxication; questions of subjectivity, rationality, and will; the interplay of colonial imagination and the developing rational order; the will-to-knowledge of intoxication)
Scapegoat
(the interiorization of intoxicated subjectivity; the problematization of chronic intoxication; the broadening of the banner of problematic intoxicants; the segmentation of the intoxicate subjectivity)
Remedy
(the deployments of intoxicants for normalization; neuropsychiatrization; strengthening of regulatory regimes; the apparatus of intoxication)
Sophrosyne?
(review; steps forward; ethics of resistance)
§0. Preface
Sorry for the mess.
§1. The seamstress
A woman, 20 years old, “single, seamstress, with no hereditary tendency to insanity”, is stricken by a headache in April of 1862: “short duration, but very severe, and during its continuance the patient was delirious.” The woman, “of a highly nervous and excitable organization, emotional and irregular in feeling”, had “delicate” health but had “suffered from no definite form of disease”. Time presses on, bringing with it the same attack every one to three months. “From the subsequent history of the patient, especially while in the asylum, we are led to believe these attacks of delirium took place at menstrual periods.”1
1864 brings rheumatism, and 1865 diphtheria. Vomiting takes the place of her sore throat. To enable her to sleep, the doctor administers morphine hypodermically for about a week. July 1867 brings “an attack of inflammation of the bowels and peritoneum”, and about four weeks of delirium. The four months after saw “frequent attacks of frenzy, during which she often threatened to take her own and her mother’s life”— “very difficult to control,” writes her physician.
October 1867 sees her recover well enough to not require the constant care of her physician, who “ascertained she was using hypodermic injections of morphia, to relieve pain in her limbs and different parts of her body.” In a letter, he wrote:2
I was informed that she was using it (morphia) to a considerable extent, and called immediately to explain to her the effects and danger attending the practice. I believe every effort was made that could be to prevail upon her to desist, but all to no purpose. She was cunning and artful, and would almost always study out some plan to get the morphia. She has used as much as two drachms [3.54 grams] in a week, in one or two well-authenticated instances. The usual amount was one drachm per week. She used but little, if any, for three of four months before she was sent to the asylum, for it was very difficult for her to get it. She has acted very strangely ever since her first sickness. She has been truly a mystery, which no one could solve.
In 1871, she is sent to the asylum in “an acutely maniacal condition, in which she was sleepless, ate little and irregularly, lost flesh and strength rapidly, and became quite feeble”; destroying clothing, pulling hair out, “noisy, incoherent, violent”, opposing care, wandering about, again uncontrollable.3
In the asylum bed, she is examined, where the attendants find “scars and ecchymosed spots, covering nearly the whole of the body which could be reached by her hand,” and she says that her morphine injections were once or twice daily for about three years— “about two thousand injections”, the doctor notes. The exact nature of her use habits is noted, from the amount to the method. After two days of sleeplessness, doctors administer chloral. The vomit subsides, and her health improves.
She begins to complain of back pain and other symptoms; placed on a menstrual stimulant, the flow begins slowly, very painfully.4 After menstruation, she “steadily gain[s] in mental strength, and [becomes] quite stout.” When the next period arrives, her right breast swells to extraordinary size. For two weeks, the doctors are unable to kill the pain. Rubbing her hand over her breast, she discovers “an elevated point just under the skin, which, on pressure, [gives] a pricking sensation.” The doctors cut her breast to remove a broken needle. On August 15th, another needle is removed; yet one more on the 28th.5
After this, she menstruates profusely and becomes delirious. She remains “talkative, restless, profane, and obscene” for twelve hours and the next day is “entirely unconscious of what had occurred.”
From now until September 28th, needles are removed from the breast every day. Menstruation recurs, alongside a “similar attack of mental disturbance.” October and November see them removed from all over the body: the left breast, the abdominal parietals, the mons veneris, the labia, and vagina. The doctor carefully notes how “some [pass] across the urethra and [render] urination difficult and painful; others across the vagina, either end being embedded in opposite sides”. More are removed from the leg, the ankle, the buttocks, near the anus, and between the shoulders.
She soldiers on: “at times irritable, petulant, fault-finding, attempting to create ill-feeling between attendants, and demanding unnecessary care and waiting upon”; “at other times [being] abnormally cheerful, gay, pleasant, and fulsome of praise of all around her.”
The first two months see little pain in the extraction because of skin “thickened, harsh and dry, and almost insensible, from the prolonged and distributed use of the injections.” Afterward, however, she suffers “acutely” and tearfully begs “that their removal might be postponed from day to day.”
She has “an attack of localized pneumonia”, accompanied by “stridulous breathing, spasm of the glottis, globus hystericus, crying, and other hysterical manifestations.”
Then, she loses appetite and sleep, becomes depressed, and gives up “all hope of recovery.” Her mind is now feeble, her pulse rapid, her “secretions offensive”; she becomes unconscious, then comatose, and she dies on the 25th of December 1871.
The report given by Dr. Judson B Andrews to Dr. H.H. Kane takes careful inventory of all the locations from which the needles were extracted:6
286 were taken from her body during life; 11 were found in the tissues after death; 3 were passed from the rectum during sickness; making a total of 300 needles and pieces. Of this number, 246 were whole, and 54 were parts of needles. One was a No. 7 sewing machine needle, and several were bent. They varied in size from No. 4 to No. 12. As regards position in the body, they were distributed about as follows: in right breast 150; left breast, 20; abdomen, 60; genitals, 20; thighs and legs, 30; back, 20. Of those removed after death, 5 were found in the right and 3 in the left breast; one in a small abscess in the epigastric, and one in the right iliac region, the point impinging upon the peritoneum, which was discolored with rust; and one in the upper part of lower lobe of left lung. The presence and position of the needles were indicated to the patient by the pricking sensation occasioned by muscular movements. They were removed in a few instances at first, by cutting down upon them. This proved to be a painful, and, from the movements of the needles in the tissues, a difficult process. Hemorrhage from the small vessels, at times, gave some trouble. Afterwards, by manipulation, the ends of the needles were engaged be- tween the thumb and forefinger, and the points, forced through the skin, were seized and the needles extracted with forceps. Sometimes much force was required to withdraw them. They changed position quite readily, and frequently moved from one to two inches in a day. They produced little local irritation or trouble beyond the pricking sensation, and did not seem to have contributed in any notable degree toward producing the fatal result. In regard to the presence of this large number of needles in the system, no information could be obtained. The patient repeatedly and persistently denied any knowledge of having introduced them, either by the stomach or through the skin.
The locations and times where they could have entered are crossed out, until “the only theory which seems […] at all tenable, is that they were introduced through the skin while she was under the influence of morphia, hypodermically administered, and while suffering from hysteria. That some were found in positions where they could not have been inserted by the patient, can be accounted for by their movements in the tissues, which were observed so often during the life of the patient.”
The “diseased condition of the brain and its membranes was a cause sufficient to account for the abnormal mental action and conduct”, it’s remarked. A transcript of the post-mortem examination is affixed below the announcement of the closed case.7
Autopsy. —Rigor present; body well nourished; anterior surface thickly studded with small cicatrices; abdomen covered with thick layer of fat. A small abscess in abdominal wall, two inches above umbilicus, three inches by one and one-half, was filled with pus and contained one needle. A second abscess, two inches above and to the right of the symphysis pubis, immediately under Poupart's ligament, contained another needle. This pressed upon the peritoneum, which, though discolored by rust, was not inflamed. From the right breast, one whole and four broken needles, and from the left one whole and two broken needles, were removed
Head. —Arachnoid opaque and thickened over right hemisphere. The left hemisphere was covered by a thin layer of pus, contained in the sub-arachnoid space. Marked depression of convolutions at vertex of both hemispheres. The brain substance was firmer than normal. The ventricles were empty, and the choroid plexus contained numerous small cysts upon its surface, filled with serum.
Thorax. —The lower lobe of the right lung was hepatized. A whole needle was found in the upper part of the lower lobe of the left lung.
Abdomen. —The liver was soft and fatty, and the spleen enlarged; kidneys were normal. The stomach was subjected to a critical examination. It was found normal, and there was no evidence that the needles were introduced into the system through that organ.
§2. The brain
The cover of National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA)’s 2014 pamphlet Drugs, Brains, and Behavior: The Science of Addiction8 is stark and colorful, the rainbow shades of white matter fibers immediately catching the eye against the dark background where black bleeds in from the left corner and overtakes the dark blue impression of cranial folds. As one scrolls down, they find a table of contents which discusses “drug abuse”, “addiction”, and “addiction science”. The next page is all black, aside from two brain scans and a line of text with a signature.
The left scan is vivid with red splotches which run around the perimeter over the turbulent teal, cerulean, and periwinkle background: “healthy brain activity: indicated glucose metabolic activity.”
The right scan is muddy, a purple Rorschach blot against a background of the ocean floor: “Drug user brain activity”. Text runs vertically across the brain: “indicated glucose metabolic activity”.
The perceptive reader with neuro-adjacent knowledge might notice that these two brains look alike; and if one looks carefully enough, one will notice the activation areas are the same, or at least almost the same, with the activation area being wider and more expansive in some areas than in the left ‘healthy’ brain, possibly due to changes in the image’s contrast. The perceptive reader with knowledge of image editing software will notice that the colors are off. The colors used for the lowest activation regions do not match up. Certainly, the images, if one looks closely enough, look to be from the same set of scans, possibly the same exact scan, edited in order to give the impression that the left brain is inherently healthy, normal, and – above all and most importantly – preferable in its vitality and vibrancy to the one on the right.
Looking closely is not expected of readers. With only three elements in the foreground (the brain scans, the description of ‘whose brain it is’, and ‘Indicated glucose metabolic activity’), to make one of them a phrase which has more or less nothing to do with the context solely on the basis that it sounds academic and provides eye-candy demonstrates that the assumption is that the very language—‘indicated glucose metabolic activity’9—will be as out of the hands of the reader as the brain scans, with neuro-adjacency being culturally aligned with difficulty, rigor, and exactitude. (e.g., “It’s not brain surgery.”)10
The reader, not looking closely, is instead expected to take the image’s general gist in/through its contextual function. It is believed they will not notice the insignificant ‘mumbo-jumbo’ about the glucose, the fact that they do not know which drug (if any) the user on the right had been subjected to, or have any reference for who these users are, nor the study from which these scans originate.
Instead, they are to shift their focus to the stark contrast between the two brain scans anchored in void: if they are a “drug user”, their brain is dark and weary; if they are not a “drug user” (and therefore “healthy”, implicitly “normal”) they are not in need of treatment for their brain – for this, anyhow.
The images are met at the bottom with blinding white text against the black background of the page:
“Drug addiction is a brain disease that can be treated.”
Nora D. Volkow, M.D.
Director
National Institute on Drug Abuse
A claim so self-evident that it only needs likely-fabricated evidence to be justified. A claim like this, of course, does not become so seemingly self-evident without a greater context. Such a claim is predicated on numerous truths already having been long-established, or at the very least, that the reader is predisposed to accepting it as truth: that a personal and individual psychology exists and may be found in the brain; that such a thing might be called a “disease”, let alone a “brain disease”; that issues of psychology and sociology (themselves only disciplines, disconnected chambers of aggregate truths) can manifest as something localizable on the body; that the delegation of such a thing must be handed over to authorities; that the state has a role in the imposition of this connection between expert authority and personal agency; &c. All of these things must be “givens” in order for the reader to be expected to nonchalantly accept this truth without questioning such a mockery of their intelligence as the crudely manipulated brain scans.
The preface carries a header: “how science has revolutionized the understanding of drug addiction”. “For much of the past century”, it reasons, “scientists studying drug abuse labored in the shadows of powerful myths and misconceptions about the nature of addiction” which “treated it as a moral failing rather than a health problem” and “shaped society’s responses to drug abuse”: “punishment rather than prevention and treatment.”
As a result of “scientific research”, we have been able to learn that “addiction is a disease that affects both the brain and behavior”, based in “biological and environmental factors.” The reader learns there is a search to discover the “genetic variations that contribute to the development and progression of the disease.”
These are “groundbreaking discoveries”, it seems, now that the shadows have cleared and at last (apparently) the way is open for scientific inquiry.11
§3. Limits of pleasure
To what—to whom—do we feel we owe a name? How does the dignity of the name entrench the limits of experience? Perhaps the most practical ethical lesson from the lineage dragging from Nietzsche into Foucault and beyond is the utter contrivance of the limits of experience; that, to be admittedly verbose, inscribed within the flesh through the construction of the soul are the very boundaries of possibility, certainly—but also of pleasure in/for itself. Crucially, too, that said boundaries may simultaneously be manipulated and extended, or compounded and limited (as Foucault argues is the function of a pseudo-scientific ‘sexuality’ in the construction of sexual desire, or Butler argues is the function of gendering in the sexing of bodies, the construction of gendered beings, and the subjectivating dimension of performance in said construction). In other words, the things we are and the things we feel are products of constant forces of creative power, both upon ourselves and upon others.
And yet many who are happy to extend themselves to this domain of limiting constructivism for the purposes of a nominal identity-based category of gender and sexuality, or in grander discussions of biopower and the power potentials of identity in a general sense, are simultaneously unwilling to do so for all spheres of pleasure, keen to maintain a sense of pseudo-moral superiority where they personally feel the limits of conventional sense are most transgressed.
This is very unpalatable to me: in doing so, they determinedly give away that thirty years ago they’d have perceived the same unconscionable transgression in the domains of gender and sexual aberration, that their liberatory flags would have been returned to sender upon arrival had they not been laundered through neoliberal discourse to begin with; don’t get me wrong (it is very easy to here), I am not of the opinion that “anything goes”, but I also don’t believe uncritically-held values are worth a damn.12
Although I don’t wish to inject myself into my work here, I will only for a moment note that I am queer, poor, and disabled in a way which more or less necessitates the use of controlled prescriptions in order to navigate the world as a normal person might. Thus, I don't advocate for this axis of critique lightly; I do so after delving deeply into it, living through it, seeing innumerable lines of intersection and learning of innumerably more which aren’t quite clear to outsiders.13 It is clear to me at this point that no perspective can be complete without an open-minded look into the historical role of intoxication both as a biopolitical strategy and as a practice of individuals, collectives, and societies. Consider this my personal plea that you treat the following investigation with appropriate urgency.
In the same stroke, many are eager to half-heartedly delimit the issue of prohibition as carceral in nature, if only in a limited and incredibly literal sense, and to apply solutions which are themselves carceral, such as mandatory forms of ‘aid’ involving full-throated deference to the constructed conventions surrounding addiction and intoxicant use.
But if (and I firmly believe that they are) the spheres of gender and sex are perceived as carceral by nature as well, in a more ethereal and fundamental experience as limiting factors which bind the body and demand one to articulate a certain form of movement, action, expression—then surely, we must grant the same prohibitive power to the entire discourse surrounding intoxication in general.
And with no doubt, the politics of intoxication (as a politics involving the direct governance of the ‘acceptable states’ of mind and consciousness) upon thorough investigation will reveal through lines carrying out into disciplines and formations of knowledge that many are likewise eager to be nominally deeply concerned with: colonial violence, incarceration, the biopolitics of disability and medicine and psychiatry, &c.
But beneath these textured layers lies a question that anybody participating within radical politics cannot ignore—that of an almost-essential queerness and strangeness, which fundamentally brings into question how the individual is permitted to govern themselves within a dense biopolitics of pleasurable action and consciousness; that of transgression and constructed pleasures and maladies, where almost-essential sickness and almost-essential divinity are likewise written into the experience of big-i Intoxication.
§4. Limits of being
It was about three years ago (time stopped and sped up and blurred with the pandemic, I’m sure you understand) that I would self-deprecatingly refer to myself as a junkie and at times even use the deeply self-wounding and pseudo-psychiatric specification of “polyaddict”. At some point I came across the work of Dr. Carl Hart, which to my own momentary neuropsychiatry-obsessed mind came as a massive blow to both my self-construction (as within the trope of the tragic addict, we carve out much sympathy for ourselves), as well as to the padlock on the cage I didn’t yet know existed. The historical perspective provided by Johann Hari (not without his problems, but that is for another post at another time) also led me to feel a sense of freedom, a notion that I’d transcended a set of highly temporal labels and been permitted to exist without it.
Not much later, stumbling into the work of Nietzsche and Foucault led me to understand the experiences I’d had with the writings of Hart and Hari—that the thick veil of moralistic “Thou Shalts” and carceral disciplines which had constructed my soul and its limits had been for a moment revealed to me.
About two months ago, I quit using intoxicants almost entirely aside from my monthly amphetamine prescription, which itself I’ve come to use in a way that we would call ‘medical’ rather than ‘recreational’.14 I quit using of my own accord, in line with how almost all cases of what we blithely call “substance use disorder” terminate: because it no longer suited the image which I had for myself in life, and no longer fit in with the way I wanted to conduct myself in our specific society and in my specific situation. I did not go to rehab, nor did I cast myself under any false impressions that I was somehow superior for quitting; I did not, do not, and will not ever project myself into the politics of worthy and unworthy use or users. I acted, I’m convinced, with as much ‘freedom’ and self-determination as one could possibly have within the context of such suffocating discourse and such carceral delimitations; I do not think people are better for quitting. I believe simply that I am better for myself for quitting. That, I don't think anybody can doubt, is a rare thing to feel: utterly demystified of the pseudo-spiritual grasp this conversation has on us.15
So, from far away now, that is the purpose of this project—one of freedom, investigation, and unraveling, a survey of intoxicate knowledge which doesn’t give undue credence to the sympathetic figures and allusions of our current discourse, and which does its best to stray from the cliches surrounding our present understanding of intoxication, intoxicants, habitual use, and so on.
It is in a sense genealogical, in that it does involve untethering those grand origins we permit those dimensions of revelation and nowness attached to topics like ‘addiction’ and ‘drug abuse’, and it will be written loosely, casually, aloofly, understanding that at the core what we seek is not some grand truth.
There’s a long lineage appearing, for instance, in Sedgwick’s famous “Epidemics of the Will”, indicating that there is an essential concept of ‘addiction’ as a diseased will (cf. Valverde’s Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom). Rinella remarks in Pharmakon: Plato, Identity, and Drug Culture in Ancient Athens that the ancient Greeks didn’t seem to have any notion of problematic use as a disease of the will, nor an insurmountable temptation to use in spite of regular opiate and alcohol use within their society.16
And in “The Discovery of Addiction”, Levine remarks that in spite of temperance groups’ protracted efforts, the first account of such an insurmountable temptation didn’t occur until well after it had been the subject of a bourgeois discussion surrounding alcoholism as a question of the will, which itself can be well-documented and traced throughout the 18th century.17
Hart, perhaps unknowingly, has extended this, turning the bourgeois rationality of the psy-sciences against itself in order to undermine the concept that, for instance, crack “addicts” will sacrifice everything for a next-dose and demonstrating that within the confines of bourgeois rationality addicts have as rational of decision-making processes as anybody else.18
All of these things, accepted and taken for granted in the modern world—that there is a biochemically justifiable concept known as ‘addiction’ which surrenders the user to sublime temptation, that intoxicants themselves carry this divine potential, and that even the very shapes of intoxicated experience (one only needs to see the Orientalist imagery and relentless ‘oblivion’ associations with opium to see this in action) have a finite form—are revealed, with sufficient investigation, to be not essential truths but instead the strategic deployment of a “mobile army of metaphors”19 in order to produce certain actions within a population—not carried out despotically but only unaware of its own existence, which in action simply seems to look the same.
To the extent that the limits of consciousness, of being, and of acceptable subjectivity are constructed, we may (as things stand) never imagine the very possibility of their non-existence. Realistically, for as long as intoxicants are produced and used in a society, they cannot reasonably exist outside a normalizing context—however, we may work to change the context within which they do exist (and we exist with them) to work toward the possibility of intoxication which frees rather than enslaves.
So, what we seek are not truths and geneses; instead, what we seek are voids, moments where these concepts didn’t exist or where they can be seen blowing out candles at birthday parties undergoing ceremonial rites to proceed into their next social crystallization, the struggles and debates and battles (bloody and not) which brought them into being and solidified them as assumptions as natural as the sky being blue. Crawling through archives as well as through primary and secondary literature, we seek the moments where these notions of immense pleasure and profound temptations have been cultivated then pruned into the mundane shrubbery which now delimits the suburbanized property of consciousness and its frayed intoxicate side paths; we seek when names were given to pleasures and when limits were given to being, following in the lineage of Foucault tracing the development from the Pre-Socratics to Roman state stoicism, then to confessions and penalties for sodomy and finally into the psychiatrized fully internalized soul-sexuality with its concomitant ritual productions of constrained desire.
In other words, I only wish to share the sense I’ve gotten, and as Foucault famously, bitterly, distantly ends the first volume of his History of Sexuality:
The irony of this deployment is in having us believe that our ‘liberation’ is in the balance.
One cannot ‘liberate’ drug users per se because a drug user may only exist in an economy of consciousness which has presupposed their demarcation and othering. The goal, then, is to work toward the disestablishment of the standing economy of consciousness, which certainly does not only include the consciousness of drug users but is rather the clearest and most obvious nexus of biopower manifested through psychiatry and all forms of social ‘wellness’.
The fact, of course, that even the idea that the so-called ‘drug user’ might be considered oppressed (no doubt even by so-called radicals deploying the same rationalization of ‘choice’ just as liberals are so apt to do) within our sociopolitical framework is likely to be met with scorn, derision, or—most insultingly—disinterest is only a demonstration itself of how the ideal of the Healthy, Normal Consciousness has embedded itself so deeply into our mode of disciplining ourselves and one another; how deeply run these networks of mutual authoritarianism.
If the shape of our being, and therefore our souls, is firmly set for us and cultivated for us as we grow and discipline ourselves and one another into ideal citizens, then we are only half-absent watchmen of the movements of the bodies within which those selves dwell. By a simple conversion, then, the movements of our bodies may never be free so long as our selves may only dwell in a very specific manner.
But why now? Put simply, in the long term, it will be impossible to direct ourselves toward meaningful practices of freedom so long as the domains of consciousness and the ability to self-practice and self-administer substances are not our own. This is not necessarily a right which must be won through the civic processes of the state but rather through the historical engagement of our ‘souls’ with relation to intoxication—the actual material dimension of growth, harvesting, and/or processing of substances is straightforward, but we would be unable to approach them in a manner that is by any means free as things stand. Certainly, if there were a revolution now, our medics of both the body and the spirit would be horribly ill-equipped. In the short term, though, there is also a steady encroachment of medico-fascism and socio-biological control which should be of grave concern to anybody whose first deference isn’t to their role within the medico-political organ of the state.
At the moment, this journey will be contained to the development of notions of intoxication in the Americas post-colonization. But as time goes on, it may be expanded. For now, we embark.
H.H. Kane, Drugs that enslave. The opium, morphine, chloral, and hashisch habits (1881), p. 54.
Ibid., p. 55
Ibid., p. 56
Ibid., p. 57
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 59
Ibid., p. 61
Drugs, Brain, and Behavior: The Science of Drug Addiction (2007, revised 2014), National Institute for Drug Abuse. (https://nida.nih.gov/sites/default/files/soa_2014.pdf)
To be clear, some sorts of brain scans do measure metabolic activity in the brain. However, there is not a reason for the phrase to appear in this context aside from the claim to a scientific legitimacy.
In reality, it seems that a shameful amount depends upon this assumption of ignorance and, frankly, undue reverence. I’m not an ‘expert’ of neuropsycho(pharmaco-)logy (at best and most flatteringly, I’m an autodidact), but I am skeptical of the reverence given to expert knowledge, especially in any field adjacent to psychiatry or medicine. Dr. Carl Hart is an expert by every meaning of the word, however, and discusses the misdirection involved in neuropsychopharmacological studies of recreational drugs at length, from the sketchy initial allocation of funding to the fudging of conclusions to meet certain results to the predictability of the ensuing sensationalist media cycle which further misinterprets these results. Neuroscientific literacy itself is not very difficult to attain and being able to generally scrutinize scientific study is even lower of a bar; I would encourage any reader to run through Drug Use for Grown-Ups (2020) at least once, and to possibly watch some of his academic talks on the subject. There will be a later piece at a later time on general deconstruction of different forms of intoxication-related media, but there are many accessible introductions to neuropsychology and neuroscience that demystify it. There’s a lot to remember, but the actual content is not very difficult to ascertain and it’s all very mechanical, I promise you.
Ibid., p. 1
I hope that this isn’t seen as a bare swipe for the purpose of causing trouble: rather, I hold the position (common for Foucauldian queers) that queerness is that which undermines the normativity of straight culture; that the sensations and domains of pleasure do not end with the boundaries of the flesh but seed into the mind, and that making any harsh divide between these two is itself a comfortable and highly temporal position; in other words, I fear that some of the greatest allies who could most benefit from standing for the freedom to practice consciousness and pleasure how one wishes, who are otherwise locked into capitalist hyperproductive modes of sober-consciousness, are hesitant to accept that intoxication is a valid axis of critical theory. And yet, there is a reason that queers and junkies once both called outsiders straights.
Poor people who do not have access to the institutional modes of circumventing prohibition (namely, psychiatrists and doctors); people of color with controlled prescriptions turned away at pharmacies due to discretionary filling of prescriptions; people of all stripes, but particularly poor people and people of color, being forced out of clinics or hospitals and at times having the cops called on them for being perceived as ‘drug seekers’—regardless of whether or not they had an actual medical condition (which has, unfortunately, led to deaths); by extension and expansion, the deep suspicion all, but especially the most vulnerable, are treated with by doctors, pharmacists, and so forth; the inability of my trans and non-binary friends to work their way through the hoops and numerous lines of consent required to start HRT; the mutual association of queerness, poverty, and the abject non-status of the dirty junkie coalescing in images of dingy crackhouses where people will do ‘anything for another hit’; the list goes on ad infinitum.
The regulatory trichotomy of ‘medical’, ‘spiritual’, and ‘recreational’ itself being a topic we will be investigating at some point.
The big-d Drug is a terrifying thing. “Don’t do drugs!” “Drugs killed him!” “She had such a bright future, but then she got into drugs.” But, note too, that once upon a time, there were no homosexuals; only strong men and/or sinners and/or sodomites, committing singular acts of love and lust, transgressions of the flesh, or engaged in bonding blurring lines between fraternal, romantic, and—at times in history, yes—paternal. The homosexual of a persistent and constant desire whose sex works to the clock of normative reproduction had to be created.
In spite of that, the ever-constant quests to search for the personal “truth” one must “live” (no doubt effective for generating marketable demographics) leads to numerous self-excavations which turn up, from thin air, the once-absent homosexual, and those desires and affects—those feelings of love, of lust, of fear of public response, and so on—are as real as anything else. Discourse, in essence, materializes reality. To recognize this does not diminish the gravity of the marginal. Rather, it strengthens them; one realizes that one is not ‘disabled’ but has become disabled—such a realization, in a sense, acts as a key to unlock the power to change one’s very being among others, to work in a real politics across multiple levels, sceneries, backdrops. Similarly, the high, the rush, the very sensations of intoxication (and even the impulse to group all intoxication together under one umbrella, or to set apart—as we do here—substance intoxication as its own implied matter) are all materializations. Even the drug itself is a materialization; as are individual drugs, arbitrarily set apart (consider that it is legal to purchase levomethamphetamine, but not in the presence of its stereoisomer—its mirror image, inevitably formed in its generation); as too are the associations with them. If there is a high at the core, they are hidden, or at the very least distorted beyond recognition, behind these names.
It is specifically because of the dignity of the name that we want them so badly and feel so much from them. A perverse and irresistible temptation is generated from the moment the curious child first asks “why it’s called a drugstore if they sell medicine?”. There is no possibility of ceremonial enjoyment nor of spiritual greatness—the limit is established, the sober subject whose identity is based in part of being Not-A-Drug-User and striving for all the positive associations which tag alongside it (being Productive, being Functioning, being a Community Pillar, being a Good Person) is then given a limit at the edge of experience so easily transgressed that it is almost impossible to imagine a real resistance from the jouissance.
It is for this reason, too, that the substances whose intoxication we rely upon to make our society run—coffee, nicotine, alcohol, and marijuana (notably first sterilized through the ‘real uses’ of medical marijuana—are not afforded this same alien unthinkable pleasure.
M. Rinella. Pharmakon: Plato, Identity, and Drug Culture in Ancient Athens (). Ebook: Afterword.
H. Levine. “The Discovery of Addiction”, Journal of Studies on Alcohol (1978), p. 153. Well-worth a read for multiple reasons to anybody interested in the history of addiction from a critical perspective.
C.L. Hart et al. “Alternative reinforcers differentially modify cocaine self-administration by humans”, Behavioral Pharmacology (2000), pp. 87-91. But one study of his touching on this or adjacent topics.
“From On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense”, The Portable Nietzsche (1977). F. Nietzsche, ed. & trans. by W. Kaufmann. p. 46.